My 16-year-old daughter wears Converse All-Stars. They're basically the same canvas sneakers that I wore when I was her age. They cost three times the $10 I used to pay for a new pair, but that's still a lot less than the $130 leather basketball shoes that Nike and other manufacturers are now selling to our teenagers.
Molly doesn't wear Converses because they're cheaper, however. She's vegetarian, and she refuses to wear shoes or clothing made from the hides of animals. I enjoy a good steak myself, but her convictions seem to me to have grown naturally from a childhood spent riding horses and taking in stray dogs and cats. Nobody's told Molly what to think, and I respect the commitment she's making.Other parents might not see things that way. To many critics of the environmental movement, such beliefs aren't a reflection of kids' own values but rather what they're being taught in the public schools. Conservatives warn that teachers are brainwashing students with radical environmentalist manifestos.
In fact, there are reasons to wonder exactly what the now-fashionable environmental education pro-grams are all about. You can't blame Arizona Rep. Rusty Bowers for being disturbed when his son came home from grade school convinced that coyotes never kill sheep. That's simply not true, and state legislators ought to be asking how accurately some emotionally charged issues are being depicted.
There's no doubt that some teachers oversimplify cause and effect, and the potential for some mischief clearly exists. That was demonstrated in 1971, when letters from thousands of schoolchildren persuaded Congress to protect feral horses and burros on Western range lands, with disastrous ecological consequences. Schools need to be careful about scaring young children with gloom-and-doom forecasts of ecological calamity, and parents have a right to object if teachers begin enlisting students on behalf of personal political causes.
Steven Landsburg, a University of Rochester economist, may be on to something when he likens the "naive environmentalism" taught at his daughter's preschool to "a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition and ritual that has much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious fundamentalism."
Nevertheless, this doesn't convince me that schools are somehow perverting public debate by teaching about environmental issues. Encouraging students to discuss environmental issues is neither new nor sinister. The National Audubon Society has been taking schoolchildren on nature walks since 1910, and other groups have long recognized the value of educating kids about wilderness and pollution problems. If anything, their efforts get all but lost in the music video culture that now surrounds our children. I drive a Land Rover myself, but I still cringe when automakers' commercials show four wheel-drive vehicles ripping through stream beds and churning up fragile mountains.
Frankly, the educational system would be remiss if it glossed over the mistakes older generations have made that leave us with damaged landscapes. I can still recall advertising slogans that I heard as a kid in the 1950s, such as DuPont's "Better Living Through Chemistry" and General Electric's `Progress Is Our Most Important Product." Those came to mind the other day when New York Gov. George E. Pataki announced that the state would join federal regulators in assessing whether to sue GE for PCB pollutants that factories evidently released decades ago into the upper Hudson River. We've all learned better since then, and hopefully the schools will teach that.
There may be a line between teaching and propaganda in environmental education, but I'm not wise enough to draw it. State and local governments could help by providing the public - including teachers and their students - with better information about which pollution threats they need to take most seriously.
My friends who are ranchers don't understand why Molly doesn't eat beef. Of course, her older brother Adam just went to work at McDonald's flipping hamburgers - so clearly the schools they've both attended didn't indoctrinate them with identical values.
It's doubtful that the most committed conservatives and the most zealous environmentalists will all be comfortable with how schools handle environmental education. The rest of us will have to trust our kids to make up their own minds and demand that governments act accordingly.